Why is the species column in the Iris dataset stored as an object type?

Why is the species column in the Iris dataset stored as an object type instead of a string type? I’m a bit confused about why categorical data is stored differently in Pandas dataframes, could anyone explain this?

The species column in the Iris dataset is stored as an object type rather than a string type because it contains categorical data—specifically, string values representing the species names. Categorical data, being non-numeric and limited in value range, necessitates this storage approach to accurately represent the species names within the column.

Hope this clears up your confusion!